Lurker > Colegreen_c12

SeabassDebeste posted...

a lot of people get a ton of replay out of res arcana fwiw. but i also don't love it.

that said, tom lehmann designed race for the galaxy, which at 2p is pretty phenomenal

I'm sure you could replay it a lot, it's just a lot of the appeal for this kind of game is discovery and interesting combos, and I feel like that wouldn't last me that long. The game would still be enjoyable as an optimization game past that point, but that's not why I enjoyed it here.

Race for the galaxy I've only played once but I enjoyed it. I rated it higher than Res Arcana but I won't say where in case I do some more rating in the future (It's not on this list)

KommunistKoala posted...

Played Res Arcana twice and both times we just used the first time setup that gives everyone a predetermined deck, and we only picked the mage to start.

I liked it both times but had the same thoughts about problems with future plays. Needs more cards for at least a bit more variety, and getting more experience means easily seeing how far behind you are just from a bad draft or whatever.

Still fun until you hit those points though

Yea honestly i considered rating it higher (and perhaps should have). It's hard to gauge how much I rate what i've played vs how much I want to play in the future so I try to balance it. I tweak my ratings periodically and this might creep up to a 7.5 even without another playthrough.

I decided to just make the list for this though and not make any changes while I was going through so you are getting my score/placement thoughts as of when I made the list

#16 - Res Arcana
My Score: 7.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/262712/res-arcana
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So at Dice Tower I would say there is four main ways to play games. You can go to the hot games area/demo area and find something setup. You can look for a flag and join a game you may know nothing about. You can setup a game and put your own flag up. Or you can schedule/join a scheduled game before the conference even started. This is one of two games I joined that was scheduled before the conference started because it sounded interesting.

I played this on my first day there with three strangers at I believe 6pm. It's a game where you play as mages trying to...accomplish stuff? I'm not entirely sure on the premise but this is basically a points race ala Dune Imperium. At the end of each round you check to see if any player has earned 10 Victory Points, and if someone has the game is over and whoever has the most wins.

So one of the players was very experienced, and another had talked to some other people about it before and my understanding is the typical game ends in about 5 rounds. An experienced player try's to win in 4, while if it takes 7 something went wrong. A round doesn't take super long, it was probably about 15-20 minutes a round for us with newer players, but I think a whole game would probably take about an hour at most with 4 experienced players.

Anyways onto the game itself. It has a very interesting mechanic where the first thing you do in the game is draft your deck. Drafting is each player draws 4 cards, you choose one and pass the rest to your left, choose one, pass one, etc until you have 4 cards. You then do it one more time passing the opposite direction so you end with 8 total cards. This is similar to a magic draft, but you are only drafting 8 cards and unlike magic you can't slim the fat at the end.

You will also get 2 mage cards to choose 1 from, and some starting resources. There's some random stuff set up in the middle that anyone can purchase (first-come first-serve). There will be a reverse player order taking of magic items (These are one round bonuses that could be getting a resource, letting you rearrange your deck, etc). Each player draws three cards and from there the game begins.

So each round of the game consists of basically three phases: Upkeep Phase, Action Phase, and Victory Check Phase. Upkeep phase is basically just collecting resources for anything you have that gives resources each round, and Victory Check Phase is just checking to see if anyone won. That's all there is to those so I'm going to go into the meat of it now.

The action phase is where the meat of the game is. Each player takes turns doing 1 thing: Playing a card from your hand for it's cost (And it will stay there, will go over this more in a bit). Paying and claiming one of the components in the middle, using an ability on anything you have in front of you that hasn't been tapped (this could be your mage, your magic item, the cards you played from your hand or what you bought from the middle), discarding a card in your hand for some resources or passing.

When a player passes they take the first player token if they are the first to pass, and then swap out their magic item for a different one from the middle (There are 8 total) and draw 1 card.

When you play a card from your hand for it's cost it stays there. Cards will generally have a cost, possibly victory points, possibly a Collect Ability (this is what you get during upkeep each turn) and usually some powers. These could be tapped abilities (once per round, once you do it for the round you can't do anything else with the card this turn) and some cost abilities (ie spend x get y). The game has an interesting mechanic where the y is sometimes placed on the card itself, which can then be retrieved on your next upkeep (I believe this is mainly to prevent infinite combos but it has other impacts too).

So this game is very tight, you are only drawing 1 card a round, when you play a card from your hand it stays on the table so you aren't really cycling through your deck like in dominion but rather cards are a resource in this game like anything else. This is also a game that is hugely about synergies, your goal during the draft is to have some idea of how you want to win this game, hopefully without relying on a singular card because if that card is on the bottom of your deck you might not get it a bit.

I liked this game a good amount, I enjoy the draft aspect, although unlike a magic draft you have no real way of knowing what people are going for. The synergies between your cards, your mage, and the place of powers on the board (one of the things in the center of the board you can go for) can lead to some interesting and unique strategies. There are some interactions between players, i.e I might have a card that gives me 3 x, but every other player gets one x. And I think this game has a good length for what it is.

There are two main issues I see having with this game if I played it a lot. The first is that if you have a bad draft (once you are experienced and know what a bad draft looks like) you are pretty much out of the game. It's not a super long game so it's not the end of the world but it's still not ideal. The other problem is there is simply put not that much stuff in this game. What I mean is that there is only 10 mages, only 40 artifact cards (the cards that make up your deck), the same 8 magic items every game and only 5 double-sided places of power. There is just not enough variety imo for a game like this to where I would want to play it regularly. We actually played this game twice and I was already seeing repeats.

But overall I enjoyed my time with this game, and without those flaws this game would probably get an 8 or maybe even an 8.5. I definitely would like to play it again, maybe a game every year or two. I also know this game has 2 expansions that are both rated higher than the game itself that the one experienced player in our group was pretty positive on and that rate higher on bgg. While I wouldn't mind doing another game or two of just the base, I think my preference would be trying it with some of the expansions mixed in to see how much they add to it.

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Likely to Trend: Neutral to slightly positive
Future: Would like to play again, maybe in a year or so. Hopefully with an expansion

Next Game Hint: This is a game based off of a game show that I had never heard of but has over 5 seasons. I also don't watch much tv so take that as you will.

And with that I am through the games that I would be ok with never playing again. From here on out is all games I enjoyed. Theres a pretty good mix and variety so I think everyone will see at least 1-2 games that they might be interested in playing.

#16 - Portals (2023)
My Score: 6.5
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/386168/portals
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So this is the first game on the list that I played outside the demo/hot games area (those two are right next to each outer) and instead in the main open gaming hall. And when I say hall what I mean is that there are tables and tables and tables and nothing else. Each table has a marker with coordinates (ie C5 is the fifth table in the third column. I think it went all the way up to like Z20 or something like that (I never actually checked). Needless to say there are a LOT of tables in this main room.

Anyways this is the first time I'm going to talk about the flags. These are also in every other room including hot games room and such but it's most relevant here. There are two types of flags: a green one which means players wanted/welcome and a yellow flag which means teacher wanted/welcome. In a big room like this it's very important because with 100+ games going on in the room it makes it easy to see what games are still being setup/not already started (and open to new players).

So anyways, I played this on my first day there when I was solo. If I don't have anything planned sometimes I like to wander and just look at games with a flag up and see if its something that interests me. In this case it was an older couple with a game called Portals so I joined them. They were very nice and had some friendly banter where they would rag on each other.

I enjoyed playing with them but unfortunately I didn't enjoy the game itself that much. We actually played it twice, the man was teaching and misremembered a few of the rules but by the end of the first game we had it all figured out and played it correctly the second time.

So portals is a game that reminds me of Azul. Azul is a game that I would consider an objectively good game, just one that I don't enjoy. And this game fits much the same boat. It's a game where you are drafting colored pieces and putting them on a 5x5 board for points, albeit it works quite differently than Azul. It's also like Azul what I would consider (what I've recently come to learn the term is called) an abstract game where there is little to no theme and its purely about the gameplay.

So Portals is a game played over 4 rounds where whoever has the most points at the end of the game is the winner. There are four main components to this game: Elemental Boards which are the five by five grid with different colors on each space of the grid. Key cards which have a number, a 3x3 grid and either 2, 3, or 4 spaces marked (these are color agnostic marks), for instance you could have a card that has a diagonal marked on it (top left, middle, bottom right). Circle of Elements, and Elemental stones which go on the circle of elements. There are 5 colors and an equal number of each color in the bag (with the amount scaling based on player on count).

So with the terminology out of the way the main thing to know is that you have two Elemental Boards and two Circle of Elements that you can use, one between you and the player on your left. And one between you and the player on the right. So you are competing with players on either side of you. Because of this I feel like 3 is a good player count for this, 4 seems useless to me because you will never interact with that fourth player. BGG recommends 2 and I can see why but I wouldn't play this with 2 personally.

So there is 3 phases to a round. First you put 6 random stones on each circle of elements as the and pass the first player marker as the setup phase. Then is the drafting phase. For this starting with first player and going clockwise they can optionally draft a key card from the middle and then mandatorily take a stone from either of your available circles and put it on a marked space on any of your key card. (You put a marker on the circle you took from as well. You can only take 3 from each circle each round). You repeat this until all of the stones have been taken.

The last phase is now starting from the lower numbered key card (Each key card has a number, the ones that need more stones have lower numbers) players then move the the pattern onto one of the two elemental board on either side of them. All of the pieces have to go on the board but if a piece is already where you are trying to place one you just lose it. (So if you have 4 on a card you might only place 3 because one of your squares was taken, but you cant choose to only place 3 by having one of the pieces hang off the edge).

So moving a completed key card onto the board is the only way to score points, and you score points in two different ways. For each stone you place that matches the color of square its put on you score points. Its 1-2-4-6 points so if matching 3 or 4 colors gives you more efficiency but is harder to pull off. The other way to score points is a color adjacency bonus. For each stone you place you score points for each stone of the same color that is adjacent to it (not including ones you are putting down from the same card). This includes both orthogonally and diagonally adjacent stones.

I will say I think this is a very smart game, a lot of it works together well, and you have to really think through your strategy of where you want to try and fit stuff in, whether you think something is going to be filled before you can use it, whether its better to try to match the color on the board or go for adjacency bonuses late in the game. And having to compete with players on both sides, you have to figure out what stones you need are high priority and what are likely to still be there later in the round. It's a lot of strategy and depth for a fairly simple ruleset.

And I think the strategy/depth is both why this game is objectively good and also just why I don't love games like these. While I actually am usually pretty good at games like these, I just don't enjoy having to think this much about things like this. I don't enjoy thinking "Ok I could do this, but that guy can also potentially play there and his key card has a lower number so he would have priority but if I take this stone he might not finish it this round as long as he doesn't prioritize it over his other card which is more valuable for him unless the other guy prioritizes blocking it".

I like thinking in games, but I generally prefer thinking primarily of my own agenda and maybe just briefly considering how other players could mess it up. In this game I feel like my thinking is spent just as much on how other players can mess me up (after about halfway through the game, the beginning when everything is wide open is pretty simple) . This is probably just a me problem, but these games are the worst offenders for giving me analysis paralysis. I hate dragging a game by doing that so I generally just do something and then feel like I'm playing suboptimal which I also don't like.

So yea, I think this game is well designed, it's just not for me. I don't hate it or anything, and I would play it if someone wanted to cause its not a super long game, I just wouldn't look forward to it.

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Likely to Trend: Neutral
Future: Would play if someone wanted to once in a while but would never suggest

Next Game Hint: In this game you play as a Mage where your deck only ever gets smaller

KommunistKoala posted...

dang had hope for Deep Regrets when a friend showed me the kickstarter, we usually play at least 4 if not 5 people so shame it probably falters at higher counts

Yea I wouldn't recommend buying it for that player count, maybe trying it once if you could borrow a copy since its still a experience, just go in with appropriate expectations

SeabassDebeste posted...

haven't heard of a single one of these - really fallen off the "scene" :(

I don't think the first two are that well known. I think Deep Regrets and emberleaf are larger releases but they are pretty recent

This one ended up even longer lol. One more game until we get to the games I actually liked.

Also note I will likely be unable to do a post most Saturday's so don't expect one tomorrow. I may do a double post Sunday to make up for it but no promises.

That's the basic gist of all the rules. I will say I don't hate this game, but I just feel like everything doesn't mesh well together. It feels to me like they made the card dancing part and then designed a board to make use of it. I'm going to start with my negatives and I will end on a positive note this time.

As someone who generally enjoys deck builders, I do not consider this a deck builder. There are two reasons for this: you have no actual deck, every card is either on the board or in your hand. And more importantly, you start with 6 cards and can draft a total of 4 more during the game. That's right you will end the game with 10 or fewer cards.

Perhaps my biggest complaint is centered around this. Each player starts with a different deck which kind of almost forces you to go down that path. For example I was very heavy on the wood, and had a ton of wood generation but not many options to get berries. I wouldn't be surprised if its found that some starting decks are just better than others.

The second part of this complaint is drafting a new card doesn't feel great. You get to pick from one of the five on the board and I ran into multiple situations where there was nobody I wanted so I held off on building a building so I didn't have to choose one. I think I was generally happy with 1 of the four guys I drafted, 1 was good, and I don't think I even played the other two I got. It just didn't feel good and I've read a review about someone getting in a stalemate where nobody would take any of the cards on the board. Only drafting 4 cards also doesn't give you a ton of flexibility to adapt. And some cards are super situational (For example there's a card that lets you take a resource off of another players card, but we only saw one card that actually put resources on itself)

Drafting the bonus cards feels similar, sometimes there's nothing up there that helps you, or its too late to make feasible. Early on taking one felt like guessing, late it felt like hoping something was there you already had done. It didn't feel too bad in the middle game cause you can pivot but at points it gave the thing I'm not huge on of "I don't want any of this so let me look at what everyone else has and deny them it' which I feel just slows a game down.

I also don't like how the Victory tiles are handled. Only the last person getting something means nobody wants to do the second to last action so it creates a stalemate unless you get the rare combo that lets you do the thing twice in one turn. For clearings if it was whoever has the most buildings in a clearing or for the banner track whoever has killed the most monsters I think it would be a lot better.

Ambiguity between the resource and the symbol is also another minor complaint. A big case of this was on the animal tracks on the top, we weren't sure if those meant get another resource of the type or it counts as a symbol on your board. I think they should have had a colored border or something around them to make it a lot more clear.

Getting resources vs storage limits and spending them also felt off. It was super easy to generate your primary resource, but generally a lot harder to generate other resources or use them. Storage limit also felt low even after upgraded, I could easily generate 10 resources in a slide action if not more, but only store 12 total.

Moving/Monsters also kind of felt tacked on, I wasn't a huge fan of it but it's not a huge deal. I feel like it should have probably just been move lets you move one space rather than move one space per foot.

Time wise it ran a little long and I think bgg recommends 3 which I think makes sense for this.

Now onto some positives. I like the card dancing concept itself, it has some interesting choices. The upgrades on your board largely feel meaningful, more symbols is great, the spaces on the right column have some great actions (including a Build action space which is imo insanely important) and I like the idea of spaces having unique things when uncovered or when played on.

I like how the 4 animal tracks on the top can be done in any order (still left to right for each track) which gives you some flexibility. For instance if I don't like any card choices I just choose a different track for now and wait. (I don't like how the first of each track is the draft though which means your first building you HAVE to take a card).

Art is great, bonus cards are pretty well done and varied.

Overall it's not a terrible game with some interesting ideas. I'd rather play Viscounts of the West Kingdom, it's "card dancing" is a lot simpler but I think that works in its favor. I would love to see a game implement this style of card dancing again with a better rest of the game to go along with it. Or maybe one that's more pure and literally just about the card dancing with no man board, i.e. a Dominion of card dancing. But as it is its simply a game I wish I liked more, and am not quite sure why it's rated so high on bgg.

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Likely to Trend: Slightly Upward
Future: Would try again if someone wanted to, but won't go out of my way for it

Next Game Hint: This game reminds me of azul in that your competing with the other players for colored tokens. Also it's only two years old and there's already a newer game with the same name as it.

#15 - Emberleaf
My Score: 6.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/426513/emberleaf
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NBIceman nailed it. If we just got out of the "bad/fundamentally flawed" tier I would call this the "not bad but not fun" tier. These games aren't awful or even bad, but they just don't enough for me to desire to play them.

So the give context I was at the conference for 4 days. One day I was solo, one day with one friend, and two days with two friends. This is one of the games I played in the hot games area with both of my friends and a stranger and we were all new, but a stranger kindly taught us all the rules to the game. I will say out of everyone I played with, this was the only stranger I didn't enjoy playing with. He wasn't awful but he just had a negative attitude about the game after a turn or two and it may have soured my opinion a little bit.

So onto the game. This is a typical points game, whoever has the most points after the game ends wins. A main part of this game is what they refer to as card dancing. If you have played Viscounts of the West Kingdom it has some similarities to that. On your turn you do one of two things: You play a card from your hand and get any lightning effects on that card or you slide all the cards you have down one to the left and resolve all of their slide effects. If they slide off the board you also get their drop effect and the card goes back in your hand.

So playing and sliding cards is done decently and is probably the best of the game. You have a grid of 2 rows and 4 columns (the two right most spaces are locked at the start however). When you play a card you can play it into any available space (not already occupied) and do the lighting bolt effect of the card you just played. Alternatively if the space has an effect on it you can choose to do that effect instead. Some cards don't have a lightning bolt effect at all so you should try to play it on one of the space effect spaces since you aren't giving anything up.

Sliding is basically what it sounds like. You start with the top left, slide it over resolve its effects, then bottom left, then second column top, second column bottom, etc. Note that if any card slides off the board, after you resolve its effect it goes back into your hand and is not considered for everything else happening. There are some symbols on the board as well that may be covered or uncovered depending on where you are in the process but I'll go over that in a bit.

There's some strategy into where you play cards, for example a weak slide effect card you may want to play all the way on the left so you get the card back after one slide, but someone with a strong slide effect you may want to play as far right as possible so you get as many slides as possible. You also have to determine when you want to do slides vs play cards, do you want to load up everything and then get some massive slides or do you want to do a couple of impactful cards and then slide to get them back.

That's pretty much it for the card dancing so lets go over the actions now. I already went over play, slide and drop actions and there is also a triggered action (when A happens get B), and charge actions (I can 1x or 2x a turn spend A to Get B). Every card (I believe) has two actions on it, some have double slide but most usually have two different types. A very common type of Action is "Gather 1 resouce per resource symbol". Resource vs Resource symbol is somewhat confusing and is one of my more minor complaints because its not always clear what its talking about. Basically though what this means is you get one of the resource (I'll use wood as an example) for each wood symbol you have on any card on your board, and any visible symbols on your board (This is what I meant when I said some spaces have symbols).

So you could for example have 8 berry symbols visible and get 8 berries (This isn't super common but also not super hard to do). This leads to my second complaint: resource generation outpaces resource storage. At the beginning of the game you can only store 8 total resources, and you have a way to upgrade it to 12. It was very common for people to max out on resources and it's honestly a lot harder to use it then to get it.

For spending resources, the main way is to build a building which is a second kind of action. There are 6 buildings on your board that all cost honey (the hardest to get resource) and provide some kind of permanent upgrade for you (this is how you unlock more storage, unlock your rightmost column, or just give you permanent symbols such as berries or woods). There are also neutral buildings that anyone can build that are cheaper and don't require honey. When you build a building you place it in your current clearing and move one of your four animal types onto it, and get whatever that animal space gave. There are 4 animal tracks of 5 each, the first of each track lets you draft a card and then you get various effects for the spaces after that. You then score VP for each unique building type connected to it, encouraging you to build a variety of building types in the same area.

So I mentioned how you build in your current clearing. There are I believe 6 clearings on the board and you have a leader meeple that starts on one. Movement is like every other resource, You play a card that says walk, and its usually "Walk 1 per foot symbol". The cost to move along a path is 1 movement + 1 for any monster on that path (most paths have 1 monster, I think 1 path has 2). So it's not very expensive to move a lot, especially if the monster have been killed. Near the end of the game I did one move action and moved halfway around the entire board. There is a bonus for visiting each clearing once to offer a little incentive not to just go to your own clearing and rake in victory points by building in it all by yourself the whole game.

So I mentioned monsters (I think they are actually called banners). Another resource is a sword, similar to the others. they allow you to attack something in a path adjacent to you and give you VP if you beat them (and make it easier to move for everyone. There is also a shared Banner track on the board that you will get to move one row down and get one of the resources on that row. If you are the one who gets it to the bottom of the track you get to take one of the 6 victory tiles (Idk what they are actually called) and refresh the monsters (the monsters are on the green easy side at the start but switch to yellow side after the first refresh).

There are two ways to get these victory tiles, being the one to get to the bottom of the banner track, or being the one to build the last building in a clearing. Once four of these are taken the game ends (after the round finishes so everyone gets an equal number of turns, there is no one more round mechanic).

The last thing to note is there are way to get bonus cards. (Visiting each clearing gives you a bonus card) where you choose one of the 5 face up cards. These can be something like "Have the most markets" or "have at least one building in four different clearings" and are pretty varied

I'm enjoying the new rougelite mode

(Also no idea how that ended up so long so sorry about the essay there, I had a lot to say on that game)

#16 - Deep Regrets
My Score: 4.5
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/397931/deep-regrets
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I played this game with one of my friends and three strangers in the hot games room.

To give context the hot games room is a section where they have some (I think around 25 this year) relatively new games they expect to be popular permanently set up. The idea is you go to a table that's already set up and ready to play, and when you are finished you just set it up for the next group. It's usually very easy to get someone to teach you a game in this room as well. In this case one of the players had played before.

So Deep regrets is a game about fishing in a Cthulhu adjacent world. The theme is very cool, with the fish having a fair vs foul theme. Fair fish are generally normal, while foul fish are weird monstrosities. There are three different depths at, with the deeper you go the greater percentage of foul fish you will see. Each depth has three different shoals and you can see on the back of the card about how big each fish will be to give you an idea of how hard it will be to catch.

The is played over 6 days with each day you rolling your dice and choosing whether to go to sea or to port. Sea is where you will spend most of your time, because that's how you catch fish and fish are victory points at the end of the game. You will likely go to port once or twice though: It lets you sell fish for money which you can use to buy rods (usually effects that help with fishing), reels (more varied effects that help with out being in sea in general), Items (one time use cards) and one-time use dice. You can only purchase each type of item once each day, with everything having a 1, 3 and 5 cost version. Usually the 1 cost is the most efficient but the 5 cost lets you look at multiple cards and choose which one you want. The last thing you can do here is Mount fish, basically multiplying the end game value of a fish (up to 3) but locking it in.

So for fishing itself, at the beginning of each day (you always have a set of 3 starter dice and can buy more in the shop) you roll all your dice and can bring in up to your dice limit into that days pool. (It ranges from 4-8 depending on your madness). You then use your dice to either catch fish (each fish has a value needed, deeper and larger fish are generally higher values) or can use any dice to drop depth (so usually using your 1s or 0s).

Each fish has a catch number, a money value (either victory points or sell price depending on what you use it for) and usually some kind of special effect. There's a few different types of abilities but the most common are on catch or on eat. Eating a fish often gives you benefits, in some cases letting you roll some of the dice you already used and use them again essentially giving you more turns.

The last main point to talk about is regrets. This game has a madness track and where you are on the track depends on how many regret cards you have. There are various ways to get regret cards, such as catching foul fish or selling them, fishing the last fish of a shoal or other players giving them to you. Your regret cards are private, but not the number you have and each regret card has a value from 0-3. Whoever ends the game with the most regret points (combined value of all your regret cards) loses their most valuable prize fish which is a pretty large setback. But the madness track only cares about cards and determines your max dice. It also determines your modifier for fair and foul fish value (sell price and end game points), ranging from -2 to 2. If you have no regret cards fair fish have a bonus and foul have a negative, while having a lot of cards gives you the opposite.

So there's a lot going on here but it actually kind of works together decently. You have to balance when you want to go to port vs go out to sea (if you roll really badly you might want to go to port that day since you'll be able to reroll your dice the next day and dice don't matter at port) The madness track works well and incentives you to lean in one direction. Since you don't have to dive you can catch a lot of smaller fair fish and rack up the +2 bonus on all of them, or go for the deeper foul fish which are worth more individually but you have to burn dice to get down there (but you have a higher max dice to compensate). So there are different strategies.

So for this game unlike the last two I actually do have a decent amount of positives, but now onto the negatives. I will give the caveat that I played this with 5 and from what I can see people generally recommend playing with 3 and I can see why. For one the game simply takes too long at 5 players for what it is.

The main issue however, is with how the regrets work. The game has a total of 60 regret cards which means there is enough for 12 per person in a 5 player game while 13 is needed for the last tier. Now the main problem here is that regret cards are way too easy to get, we probably got about 150 regret cards in our game. But the main sticking point is what happens once you run out of regret cards in the deck? Well you take one from another player (You choose the player but the card is chosen at random). I legitimately went from 14 regret cards down to 2 in a single round. And this completely ruined me since I had foul fish. Instead of players trying to get rid of their high number regret cards and keeping the 0s and 1s so that they didn't have get rid of the prize fish, it basically became a grab as many regrets as you can (with one guy having over half of them). That guy also ended the game with an item card that let him draw like 15 cards and he completely emptied two players of regrets, making almost all of their fish worth -2 each instead of +1 or +2. It was just not fun in a game this long. I think 3 players might mitigate this a lot because there's a lot more cards to go around.

There are also a few minor issues, the main one being the rods, reels, item cards and dink cards (you get dink cards as a consolation prize for failing to catch a fish, or passing early) are not balanced. I'm not talking about one rod working better for your strategy than another which I would be ok with (and a reason to spend more money to get more options) but some are just straight better than others. For example I got a rod that lets me reorder the top 2 fish of a pile every time I fish (which is already better than a lot of the rods), while someone else got a rod that lets them reorder the top 3 every time they fish. There's a rod that gives a discount on large fish vs a rod that gives a discount on every fish. Etc, etc.

The other part of the randomness is the dice. Sure its a dice game so some randomness is involved, but when you buy dice there's also three tiers of dice and you get a random tier. One dice is 0-0-1-2 while one is 2-2-3-3. There are just too many layers of luck built on top of each other here (luck on which dice I get, luck if i get good equipment, luck on what I roll, luck on whether i even want to catch the fish I flip). I personally don't mind the luck on which fish you attempt to catch because there are ways to mitigate this and look at fish before deciding, but I think the extreme variance in shopping is too much.

Overall though while I gave this a 4.5, I still think this game is worth trying if you like the theme (preferable with three players) because its a fun theme as long as you go in with the right expectations and treat it more as a experience than a super competitive game. I could easily see this rising to like a 6-6.5 if I played with three players or they add some expansion to fix some of these things. I do not regret playing it but I wouldn't play it again with 5 players at least

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Likely to Trend: Upward
Future: Would try again if a someone really wanted to with a smaller group (ideally 3).

Next Game Hint: A new game involving cute animals and dancing (of the card variety)

Also I honestly hate being negative, I only have 1 more negative review, 2 neutrals and after that the rest will all be positive

#17 - Alliances (I believe)
My Score: 4.5
BGG Link: Doesn't have one (yet)

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So I actually played this game at the same demo booth as Wild Realms. This game isn't out yet as far as I can tell, and doesn't even have a bgg page yet and is hard to find any info on it whatsoever.

This is a quick card game. I believe it's a two player game only, but i'm not positive. It takes place in the same universe as Wild Realms but is a much different experience. You are drafting three animal cards: you assign one as your leader, one as a fighter and one as a collector. You activate your leader ability and then fight, with the higher number fighter winning, and the losing fighter dyeing, and that player activating their collector ability. You then get up to 2 more cards and pick a final three for scoring.

Sorry for the not great explanation on this one, unfortunately I only played it once for 5 minutes and I have no way to look up the rules.

For quick game simple game, I'm honestly still not sure if I understand all the rules correctly but basically it kind of had the same problems as Wild Realms to me. Cards seem imbalanced and honestly has too much going on. Also the initial fight didn't seem that important to me since you only get to choose three cards at the end anyways and I ended with 5.

It's not a terrible game, and with it being a quick time investment I would potentially try it again, but honestly 2 player 5 minute games is such a weird niche for me that I never see it being brought to the table for me. I don't do a ton of 2 player gaming and if I am it would be something like 7 wonders duel or sky team.

I will say that like Wild Realms, the art is nice.

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Likely to Trend: Neutral to Slightly Upward
Future: Would play again if a situation presented itself but I don't see it.

Next Game Hint*: I regret not liking this as much as most other people

*I skipped this for the last one because this game would have been impossible to guess

KommunistKoala posted...

Nice, hope to go to one of their cons eventually, but not in the cards this year.

But always excited to read/talk about board games

If you ever do go to DTE let me know, I plan on trying to go every year for the foreseeable future.

#18: Wild Realms
My Score: 4.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/347587/wild-realms

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This was one of the first games I played at this convention, and I played it in the demo area. I played this 1v1 against the guy giving the demo and honestly I was not impressed.

The goal of the game is the be the first one with four closed habitats (Each player starts with one closed habitat of a different type). A closed habitat requires having the appropriate habitat card (I believe its something like ocean, forest, fire and air), an animal for each of the five symbols of which one is a leader.

The basics behind this game is you are drawing up to 5 animal cards each turn, placing them freely on either a habitat that you have the card for or your bench. You can then use your bench to attack another players habitat if you have a leader on your bench. To attack, the color of the creature has to match the habitat it is attacking, then you can use any abilities the creature has and roll however many dice the card says and if you match the number on any of the creatures in that habitat (To clarify, each creature has a color, a symbol, a number, and possibly an ability) you can choose one to discard.

So I have a few issues with this game. The main one is that attacking generally just feels bad. You are using one of your cards to have a chance at discarding another players cards. At most its a one to one trade which is slightly beneficial because you are likely only attacking with symbols you don't need, but a lot of the time it just whiffs.

My next issue is that the cards are not balanced, some abilities are borderline useless or super situational (I had one that discards all off an opponents fish, but since it only can attack one habitat and he had no fish in that habitat it was basically useless) while others are really strong (There's a rhino that makes an opponent shuffle all but one card in a habitat back into the deck, which is usually 2-3 cards).

I don't particular care for the color mechanic. In a 1v1 both players start with one realm closed, so 1/4th of my cards can't attack from the get-go. You also have to draw each of the three habitat cards you don't start with, which I could easily see being super frustrating if you dont draw one while someone else draws them all from the get go.

There's also a legendary creature mechanic which is fine but you have to draw the card to trigger it, and there was only one drawn in my entire game so it was rare enough to not be a huge factor. And another mechanic called a realm battle where you can have a closed realm attack another and it is basically just dice rolling until someone loses (The guy did say this was largely disliked and they are changing it in the next version so I won't hold it against them).

I will say the art is nice and cool, but the game just had too many things that feel bad. Attacking generally feels bad, not drawing what you need feels bad, not drawing a habitat you need feels bad, drawing a habitat you already have feels bad, being on the receiving end of a super strong card feels bad, being on the receiving end of a situational card that you didn't know about feels bad.

I will say the games not super long so it's not the end of the world, and some of these issues would be lessened with four players (BGG has 2 players as the best for some reason which I can't see how it's true). But honestly I don't really see enough potential even with 4 players for this to be worth playing over something else.

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Likely to Trend*: Slightly Upward
Future: Would likely not play again

(Likely to Trend means basically what I think the game score has potential to go to if I give it another chance. In this case I could see it maybe going up to a 4.5 or even a 5 if I played it with 4 players.)

General Info on my Ranking System:

0-3: Various levels of unplayable. I would not play these games unless guilted into it
3-5: Games I generally don't want to play, but could be convinced to try them again in some cases
5-6: Games I don't love but would play once if someone wanted to
6-7: Ok games I would play if someone suggested, but won't suggest myself
7-8: Games that I like but don't love. I would suggest some of these with certain groups (party games mostly)
8-9: Great games that I enjoy. Will suggest these a good amount of time
9-10: Some of the best games of all time. I'm always down to play these games

I recently returned from Dice Tower East and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I played 18 games (some multiple times), all of which were new to me (besides one minor exception). I figured I'd do rankings + write-ups on those games. Might do some other rankings afterwards if there's interest, but I'll see how this goes first.

Will try to do one ranking a day starting tomorrow.

Also figured this could be a general board game topic as well.

Looks like i can't join for 24 hours but I'll try to join yours tommorow then

Now that I'm 40, anyone in a good companion? I don't think we have enough players to bother making a b8 one

I'm currently at 29 waiting for dailies to get to 30 lol.

Also i guess companios are guilds?

Id 60027251705

Friend requested the two codes I saw so far

Enjoying it so far. Still in prolonged mode a few hours in

Maybe like once or twice a week, 90% of thr time a zero drink.

I don't really drink alcohol much though so I'm not too worried about it

With that criteria Pokmon is a metroidvania

I have Copilot integrated into my visual code at work since they pay for it. I don't use it a ton but its helpful to autocomplete some repetitive stuff sometimes, or write comments.

I have used it to clean up some emails/resumes before.

I used it some for some assistance with google ads.

But overall i don't use it regularly.

It actually doesn't matter that much, there's advantages to both ways. I believe it largely depends on your habits what is best. Ie how soon after you wake up are you eating etc. The main thing is to make sure you consistently do it.

If you do it after your first meal, you need to wait 30-60 minutes for your enamal to be ok (the more acidic whatever you eat, like coffee/soda, the longer you should wait.

People getting annoyed by grammatical/spelling stuff that doesn't matter

Fiop posted...

I grew up in New Orleans and return regularly to visit family. People ask me from time to time about what to do there, but I'm usually less helpful than you'd think. I just usually do family stuff when I go and not the usual tourist stuff.

Anyway, I'm a fan of the National WWII Museum. The Audobon Aquarium is cool but I haven't been back much since I was a kid.

Also, Morning Call can be a good alternative to Cafe Du Monde for Beignets, but you can get Cafe Du Monde at the airport anyway.

Im kind of the same way, never lived there but been there a lot as i had a lot of family living there until a year ago and i would go up for a month at a time.

But Cafe Du Monde > Morning call =P (I actually mean this but its personal preference, i know people who think the reverse but either are good)

It's been a bit but main things to note:

• Crime in New Orleans is up (unless this changed recently). Some areas are obviously safer than others but just be careful. Bourbon Street i believe is a high petty crime area so be ready for that.(Bourbon street isnt my thing so no recs there)
• Beignets are amazing. Cafe Du Monde like people said. The one I usually go to isnt super crowded, but if you ever go to city park theres one there. (Some people like the coffee, I like the chocolate milk)
• Poboys are great, shouldn't be too hard to find a good one.
• Im personally a fan of Crawfish (with the potatos, corn and sausage) and I believe this is prime season. Its something we usually would get like 10 pounds of and bring home though so I'm not sure if you'll be able to do it now. You could probably go to a boil place or some resturants though and get them
• Mr. Eds is solid Should be able to get a poboy or some traditional cajun there (My favorite poy bo is a french fry poboy with gravy but likea shrimp or crawfish is solid too)
• Mr B's is a more upscale place, pretty good though. I recommend the barbeque shrimp if you go and dip the bread in the sauce
• Dragos was good but started to go downhill a little bit last time I was there, but I def recommend the charbroiled oysters if you go. (also dip the bread in the sauce)
• Dots Diner is a nice diner chain in the area
• Tastee Donuts is pretty solid if you want donuts, but some are better than others. My dads favorite donut is there jelly donut.
• Theres some pretty good escape rooms in the area if that interests you at all. I can give some recs if so
• One of my absolute favorite places is Dennis' Seafood but its a market (you go get stuff and bring it home, no place to eat). They do have some weird hours though, but you can get crawfish there, but my favorite is the hot tamales. The stuffed arthichokes are also good, and they have some really good seafood dips
• I'd recommend trying a hubig pie if you see one somewhere, I like the lemon one. Its just a local bakery that burned down and rebuilt a few years ago, kind of simple but i enjoy them.
• Entertainment wise I could give you more during mardi gras season or christmas/halloween time but the WW2 museum is pretty cool.

I could probably recommend some more stuff (resturants mostly), but most of that stuff is within the area of the french quarter

Also if you like alcohol, I don't know a ton but Daiquiris are pretty big there

Edit: almost for, harbor seafood & oysters bar is a solid affordable place, with a nice market right next door

cutscene - anything cutting the scene so anything cutting typical gameplay.

That's why text isn't a cutscene in a vn but in most games it is

I can do it easily with water. multiple at once

I can do it without water less easily. Somewhat depends on the size of the pill

While it's mechanically a rougelite, experience wise it's more like a time loop game imo.

I played the demo and enjoyed it, but I didnt get outer wilds vibes (not that I beat outer wilds). I would say something like the witness might be closer but really it just felt unique.

finger originally came from the word 5 so I find this whole thing kind of funny.

Digit refers to fingers or toes.
Finger is the digits of the hands
toes is the digits of the feet

Real curious to hear from someone who actually thinks it's four.

Like what is the fingernail of the thumb called? The thumbnail?

I should throw out thr there's a lot of controversy about the bazaar right now due to main guy behind it being a scumbag and some really terrible monetization changes (game is banned in some countries now because of it).

It's basically got some p2w elements now that we're promised never to be added. I bought the founders pack half a year ago and now refuse to touch it again

So you basically got money back from your w2 for spending more than you earned on your trip

If you didn't have the w2 you would have gotten nothing (afaik)

An isekai is basically (imo) if the protagonist is aware he is in a different world or not.

Like Dr. Stone is not an isekai because they are very much aware. But animes where they are just far in the future but dont realize it, because from their perspective it is another world.

Like traveling to the 1500s might or might be not be an isekai depending on if the protagonist realizes it, it's all about their perspective.

Stuff like portal is imo a non-starter because that game gives me a bit of a headache could be a nightmare for people not used to playing 3d games.

Really 3d stuff in general can be tough for people unfamiliar.

Looked through my list for some more stuff though
Heres some stuff that hasn't been mentioned that could be good:
-Contradiction: Spot The Liar
-Broken Age*
-Day of the Tentacle*
-Overboard (Interesting take where you are the villian and basically trying to get away with murder in a time loop esque game)

Things mentioned already that I think are good
-Ghost Trick (Good length for this, a little bit of gameplay but not too much)
-Phoenix Wright Stuff
-Walking Dead Telltale (i dont like it but its good for this)
-Stanley Parable (Has some meta stuff so I wouldn't start with it like foolmo said but could easily be like a class thing of the class kind of thing)
-Traditional Point and Clicks like Secret of Monkey Island*
-Papers Please maybe? Might be too hard for some

*I would definitely tell your class for any point and click to use a guide if they get frustrated at all which is why it probably wouldnt be my first choice
Could also do a more jokey thing like untitled goose game

Ghost Trick?

Is it under 20 hours?

I've kind of dropped off this, might log in here and there but whenever trading is announced at me and I can trade away some dupes, if I have 3 3star Charizards

I have access to one. We use it year round and won't cancel anytime soon

Ringworm posted...

Just did a wonder pick with 4 cards I didn't have, including an Ex from the new pack. Got the Old Amber card of course, which I already had multiple copies of from both packs. Not having the good luck some of you seem to be having.

I'm having ok luck with packs but it's been a long time since I've even seen a wonder pick option with more than 1 new card and an even longer time since I've actually gotten a new card.

opened 10 packs so far and got the 3 star celebi already

KCF0107 posted...

1 Venusaur
4 Greninja
1 Haunted
4 Onix
7 Jigglypuff

Last three have been Greninja. The Venusaur was from the second pack that I opened from this event

Theres a Venusaur? Ugh

I have three three star Charizard exs and 0 bellsprouts

This game makes no sense

skullbone posted...

They have to add a currency or put a limit, otherwise people would make 100 accounts and trade all of the rares to their main account for commons.

I don't play Pokemon Go but I heard that they have a similar currency for trading.

They could just make it where you can only trade for same rarity

my strat is always pick the top middle